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Disrupting Education With Bootcamps

The education industry is one of the only industries that has not drastically changed because of new technology. It is highly regulated and getting any new disruptive education programs accredited is always an uphill battle. However, things students learned from accredited universities are often less important or irrelevant to what these people are doing for their careers after graduation. Many students prefer to get an education in jobs that are in-demand so they become more hirable.

In the education space there are a growing number of focused, short-term “bootcamps”. The concept originated in San Francisco which had a problem finding talented programmers. The number of coding bootcamps boomed, but despite this, the demand for programmers remains.

Many other hyper-focused bootcamps have sprung up recently and established companies like Kaplan are getting in on it. These programs usually last four to six months and have since emerged in other industries that don’t have access to quality talent. STEM careers (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) are in the highest demand, but even social media marketing bootcamps exist.

These bootcamps are offered on-line as well. Udacity was first to offer these online bootcamps. Udacity is hailed as a potential IPO candidate and just received $35 million in a Series C round. Other education sites like Lynda and Skillshare that offer on-demand videos teach these STEM skills as well and have much larger amounts of content. However, Udacity offers something these sites do not, a degree.

Udacity calls their degrees, “nanodegrees”. They are highly specialized “degrees” and meant to teach the skills necessary in today’s economy; skills most students don’t get from college.

An increasing number of companies are finding these students competent enough to hire. Hack Reactor is a coding boot camp out of San Francisco that focuses on Javascript, and 99% of their graduates get hired at an average starting salary of $105,000.

As these bootcamps refine their strategy, grow in number, and more companies start hiring these students, what will happen to universities?